Hey! This is the first ever job breakdown at Teachers Welcome. In this email I breakdown a LIVE job posting and help teachers understand how their skills are relevant to the role.
The first job is a Customer Success position at Wildbit. I’m a big fan of the way they run their company and have followed their progress for the last several years. A friend of mine took a job there and he’s been extremely happy.
Disclosure: the Postmark team at Wildbit has sponsored some community events that I help run. However, they did not sponsor this job posting breakdown in anyway. The BreakdownWildbit is the team behind Postmark, DMARC Digests, People-First Jobs, and Beanstalk. We’re self-funded, profitable, and have been working remotely since 2000.
Self-funded means they didn’t take on any external investment. Basically it means the founders are truly their own bosses and can basically do whatever they want. External investment often comes with strings that the investors can pull. Wildbit doesn’t have that. For example, they didn’t need anyone’s permission to try a 4-day work week and then make it permanent. Imagine if you had an 80% contract to teach 4 days a week, but you got paid for the full week.
We believe that businesses are human, and our team is committed to proving you can grow a profitable company while prioritizing people first. We exist to support our team, and our values and products reflect the care and intention that we operate with.
They state that they put people first and it shows if you look at their benefits and some of the aspects of this role. They’re interested in getting your best self but not in strip mining you for all your worth and then moving on.
Because of their commitment to their team, they are likely very careful who they hire. Don’t expect this to be easy.
As a teacher I think you’ll find this attitude to be jarringly positive. They are not going to treat you as a budget item to be managed down to the lowest cost. They are going to actively invest in you.
We’re looking for 2 people to join our Customer Success (CS) Team that will report to our Head of Customer Success, Dana Chaby. This is a 100% remote position and open to candidates with availability to work 9am–5pm GMT -1 to GMT +2.
Customer Success is a more thoughtful and strategic cousin to Customer Support. They explain a bit more below.
GMT is basically western Europe time zone. If you’re on the west coast of North America thats 2am - 10am. UTC and GMT are basically the same. You can see a nice interactive chart of timezones at https://everytimezone.com/
Our CS team The purpose of this role is to help our customers get the most out of our products. Our view is that customer success is about a subtle shift from focusing on making excellent products to making excellent users. That also means reactive customer support (aka responding to tickets) is just one part of the job. And while we aim to resolve 60% of cases on the first reply along with a time to first response of <2 hours, members of our CS team also have one day per week to focus on proactive education: creating and contributing to user guides, blog posts, tutorials, videos, onboarding, and more.
Excellent users vs excellent products is a subtle shift, but a powerful one. It shows that they are, again, people first. Many customer support teams focus is to reduce the defects of the product and keep people from getting angry as much as possible. This focus is more about making people happy and successful.
I like to think of this as the difference between offering pain killers vs stepping in early and offering wellness coaching. You are going to be far more successful with a coach than you are someone who just gives you a couple aspirin and tells you to call back the next day. As a teacher this is like student success. You want them to understand and find joy in what they are learning, not merely score well on a standardized test.
“Tickets” is a word that refers to the specific requests, issues, question, or problem that a user experiences. They would be entered and tracked in a system and referred to as tickets.
They mention some statistics here. Resolve 60% of cases on the first reply, a time to first response of <2 hours. This is an indication of a team that measures things. This means the team is goal oriented and is capable of giving objective feedback that will help improve your growth. Think of this as a reading assessment where you are keeping a running reading record. Data is powerful to measure success and provide evidence of growth. Data and feedback will let you know if you are doing a good job and how to improve.
They also mention “proactive education”. The contract to this would be reactive where you would wait around for customers to have problems before responding to them. That’s the way a lot of customer support teams operate. Reacting.
Proactive means getting in front of customers and building resources to help them be successful from day one. It’s a bit like multi-media curriculum development.
What this role isn’t: We know that bots aren’t as good as humans when it comes to problem solving, and believe it’s better to take the time to fully address an issue rather than slap on a band-aid and quickly move on. This role is not about following heartless scripts to retain customers, meeting ridiculous call completion goals, or quickly closing cases with canned replies.
This is a nice note. It signals to you that this position (and the company) is not going to suck your soul dry with monotonous purposeless work.
Today, the CS team includes 6 members who are distributed across several time zones while supporting the Wildbit portfolio of brands. As our customer base grows, we’re expanding the team to ensure redundancy and coverage across time zones while ensuring our team has time for deep focus work.
Again, a commitment to their team that they value them as people and want them to have a good experience at work. So, your role here is not only to provide support to others on the team by giving coverage in important time zones, you are also going to get coverage so you can focus on deep work.
The role This position will primarily support Postmark, a cloud email infrastructure product that allows businesses to send and receive transactional and broadcast emails from their applications. We aim to make email seamless, dependable, and easy for product teams. Postmark customers have a range of backgrounds so you should be comfortable supporting non-technical users as well as highly experienced developers. We’re open to exploring opportunities for this role to work with more Wildbit brands in the future.
So now we are getting into some nitty gritty about the product that this role needs to support. I’ll be honest here. If you’re a teacher and you’re thinking… what the heck is “transactional email” or “cloud email infrastructure” this is going to be a bit of a challenge. This is a critical part of any software systems. Basically, email that you get from the software you use is something that could be sent through Postmark. E.g. that email when you forget your password, or that email about the new feature that they just added.
At this point, if you have zero interest in supporting a technical product, then this isn’t for you. You would have an uphill battle for sure as there are likely other candidates who are coming from a related company or product.
However, I do think that Wildbit is the type of company that won’t necessarily hold that against you. If you think you can learn this stuff or already dabble a bit in technical things, I think you should apply anyway. The worse that can happen is they say “no thanks” (and I promise, they won’t be rude when they say no).
Your responsibilities will include: Being the first point of troubleshooting customers when they reach out for assistance.
This looks most like a traditional customer support role. If a customer has a question, they ask and you respond (as quickly as you can). Note, this says “first point”. That means that they don’t expect you to solve 100% of the problems. Some problems may need to be escalated to an engineer on the team. You would have some support from others in trying to ensure the customer experiences success. But it’s going to be your responsibility to do the troubleshooting and understand who needs to be brought in if you can’t solve it directly.
Helping new customers get up to speed quickly, triaging issues, and answering questions from potential customers.
Triaging issues just means deciding which issues are priority and who should be tasked with solving them.
Educating customers on industry best practices
This is going to require that you not only learn what the rest of the industry does, but also teach those practices to the customer. This is right in the wheelhouse of a teacher. You don’t have to be a practicing geologist to understand how to give a good lesson on land formations. You have the skills to research things and translate that into understandable information. Creating customer-facing help documentation and user guides
If you spent any time during COVID doing some remote teaching. This is that (but with less pressure). Creating documentation and consumable material for customers is JUST like creating lesson plans and other instructional content.
Maintaining our internal knowledge base.
This is a little bit like creating outward documentation for customers, except it’s for the rest of the team. This is a bit like working with your collaboration partner for your classroom.
Communicating to customers primarily via email. We also use live chat and hop on an occasional phone call.
In order to work remotely across space AND time, you’ll need to develop strong ASYNCHRONOUS communication skills. Despite a lot of negative opinions about email, it’s a very good asynchronous communication medium. Customers often won’t want to wait around for a phone call or a response via chat, so they’ll email. This is good for them and you. It gives you the time and space to be a bit more thoughtful in your response and the opportunity to resolve the question in one interaction rather than a series of shorter back-and-forths.
Representing the voice of the customer to our product team.
This is one of the more meaningful aspects of this role, in my opinion. This is essentially advocating for your students as a teacher… except it’s advocating for the customer. The cool thing is that you won’t be advocating in a potentially adversarial situation, you’ll be advocating for the customer to your own team. These conversations are almost always constructive and supportive.
This is a strategic benefit of this role as you’ll be someone with deep empathy for the customer and their struggles and will help shape the direction of the product. Doing well at this would lead well into product management roles where you have even more influence over the direction of products.
Helping our team identify where we can better meet the needs of our customers.
Again, this is advocacy for the customer. Think back to a time when you had an idea for a different way of doing something in the classroom or in the school. Maybe you told your administrator and they said “no” or maybe you didn’t bother bringing it up at all… because… you know… the “system”.
This is like that except that your team will welcome these ideas. I think part of the reason this is the case is that the outcomes are a lot more connected with the inputs and it’s easier to justify making the investment or taking the risk. Also, it helps that the people making the decisions to do or not do a thing are a lot closer to you AND there is WAY less red tape.
Collaborating with your teammates to troubleshoot complex problems
One of the great things about remote work is that there is a lot of space for you to really work on the problem. In a classroom, if something becomes a problem you’re kind of on your own AND you don’t have the time to fix it anyways because you have 20+ little demands on your time… the ENTIRE TIME.
Remote work is fantastically different.
Sure there are problems that need to be solved quickly, but most of the time you have the time to think about it… work in it a bit… ask a colleague… maybe sleep on it and attack it again the next day. And if everyone on your team is in the same boat, you’ll get a lot of support when you want it. It’s a much more sustainable way of working.
Empowering developers to do their best work—and having fun doing it.
Like I said, this is a slightly more technical role. So your customers will be software developers. This doesn’t mean you need to be a developer, but having some understanding about what they do and how they work will be helpful.
As a developer myself, I absolutely love working with products that make me feel like a super hero. If I can use a product that is so easy to use and does so much for me, I will sing about it to everyone I know. (In fact, we do this about Postmark in some of our community events)
Also the fact that they want you to have fun doing this brings me joy. And I know, for a fact, they aren’t just saying this because it looks good on a job posting. They really do want you to have fun.
What are the key things we’re looking for?
Ok, I’m going to let you in on a secret. NOTHING in a job posting is a requirement. It’s all a list of top desires. Most of the time none of the candidates will hit all the things listed on a job posting. That being said, having NONE of the skills is a disadvantage, but not having all of them is not a deal breaker. If you feel like you are really strong in some of the areas called out on this posting and have the confidence to be able to learn a few of the others, you should apply.
Back the the breakdown…
You’re an aspiring generalist, but you’re more technical than the typical customer support professional with interests that go above and beyond basic account and billing questions. Maybe you’ve dabbled in code or you’re really good at solving tricky problems.
Here’s another clue that they are looking for someone with more technical skills than most. Again, if you’re really not interested in technical stuff, this probably isn’t the role for you. But notice that they said “Maybe you’ve dabbled in code”. They don’t expect it.
They also say “generalist” here. To me this hints at a desire to find someone who has a broad base of skills and interest. Maybe not necessarily expertise in a thousand different things, but definitely an ability to quickly learn about many different things. If you’re naturally curious about everything, you’d probably be a good fit.
You know what an API is (or you’re interested in learning how to support an API-based product) and are comfortable answering questions about topics like DNS settings. Ooof. “API”. I told you this is a bit technical. Now I’ve been working with technology as a developer for a couple decades, so I may not be the best person to hear “this isn’t so bad” from.
An API is an Application Programming Interface (I actually had to look that up just to be sure). It’s how software talks to each other. I would recommend reading about Postmark’s API in the documentation. If you’ve not done a lot of programming before, it may feel overwhelming.
DNS (Domain Name Service), on the other hand, is a lot more understandable. It’s still super technical and full of challenges and problems, but I think it’s a lot more understandable if you’ve never done any programming. Basically, DNS is like the phone book. Instead of names and phone numbers, it’s domain names and IP addresses.
You’ve previously thrived in customer support for a SaaS product with a minimum of 2 years experience.
This says a minimum of 2 years of experience. That’s probably a soft cap… but it does indicate the types of people they expect to apply. So as a teacher, unless you’ve done this before, you might be at a disadvantage.
However, for a magical candidate, these skills are something that can be taught. Maybe apply anyways 🙂
Oh… and SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service. Basically all web based software (your webmail, Netflix, online invoicing software) is a SaaS. You essentially “rent” access to the software rather than buying a boxed copy that you install on your computer.
You have an understanding of email technology and authentication topics like SMTP, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
This is some technical stuff about email. I’m not going to explain it here, but a motivated teacher should be able to research this over a weekend to have a better understanding.
You are fluent in English and can demonstrate clear and concise written communication skills.
If you are a teacher and you are reading this, you ace this part 🙂
Your wide skill set allows you to get up to speed quickly when learning new products.
Remember “generalist” from above. They’re re-iterating that here with an emphasis on quick learning. As a teacher I think you have the skills to learn both about their product, Postmark, and the industry and technology as a whole.
You’re patient and empathetic towards others with a strong desire to learn and teach.
Ha. They flat out say “teach” here! See… they want a teacher so bad!
In all honesty though, this re-enforces why I think teachers can make a real different in organizations like this. Your desire and ability to learn and then teach things is a tremendous asset.
Learn more about the key traits of a good Customer Success team member.
This is a link to a great resource about what is a good and bad customer success team member. It’s a worthwhile read for any customer success role, whether here or elsewhere.
Required exercise Your resume is a great snapshot of what you’ve done in the past. We’d love to see what you’re capable of now. To give us an idea of your skills and voice, please complete TWO of the following parts of the required sample exercise. There is a spot to share a link to your responses on the application page (i.e., Google doc, Paper doc, etc.). Emails can bounce for a variety of reasons. How would you explain to a customer the reason an email they sent through Postmark returned a soft bounce? A customer reached out to Postmark support asking about a feature we don’t currently have (and it’s not coming up in the near future). How would you handle that, and how would you reply to them? Please also tell us a little about why you answered this way. What is your thought process behind it? Explain to a customer how to authenticate their domain with DKIM. Use the documentation in our support center as a resource. This project is all about showcasing what you can do. Don’t worry about trying to guess what we would do—make it your own, and have fun with it. We are looking to see a complete picture of your work: your thought process, planning, writing skills, and all that goes with it. This exercise is required and your application will not be considered for the next stage of the interview process if this is incomplete.
I won’t go into detail about the required exercise as that’s something for each candidate to do on their own. My only advice is do your best and be honest. I would allocate a couple hours to each question for research and a response.
The question about DKIM is the most technical, but even still is something that should be researchable. Be honest in your answer if you didn’t know about this before hand. Modesty goes a long way.
The fact that they require an exercise is good for you. For one, it means that the candidate pool will be a bit smaller as they will flat out reject anyone who didn’t bother. It also means that they are really looking for the right person. If your resume doesn’t give you a lot of confidence these exercises and the questions on the application are your opportunity to shine! |